Russian justice in the dock over anti-corruption lawyer's agonising death in prison

The death of Sergei Magnitsky after a year in prison without trial has raised
frightening questions over Russia's justice system - and the wisdom of
challenging corruption.

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Friends and relatives take part in the funeral ceremony of Sergei Magnitsky at a cemetery in MoscowPhoto: ANDREW OSBORN

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Sergei Magnitsky

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Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow where Sergei Magnitsky was being heldPhoto: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Philip Aldrick, Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Philip Sherwell

8:00AM GMT 22 Nov 2009

Beneath a wintry grey sky, the mourners filed slowly past hundreds of Soviet-era graves where Red Army soldiers who died defending Moscow from the Nazis had been buried.

The squat Communist-era tower blocks surrounding the sprawling cemetery were a stark reminder of the past. But the man laid to rest in the polished wooden casket on Friday was the victim of a new Russia where capitalism and corruption can be a toxic combination.

Sergei Magnitsky had clung to the hope that he could talk his way out of the legal trapdoor through which he had fallen. As a lawyer representing London-based Hermitage Capital Management, he had spurned advice to flee his homeland and tried instead to unravel a web of corruption in a country where the rule of law is at best shaky.

For the 37-year-old father of two sons, that battle ended in a mysterious and agonising death after nearly a year in custody in a series of squalid Moscow jails. First he was framed, and then killed by incompetence mixed with neglect, say his family and friends.

His fate is a grim reminder of the costs of clashing with powerful vested interests in a country where campaigning journalists and human rights activists are often murdered with impunity.

Nor are status and wealth any defence for those who make the wrong enemies as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, can testify. The former billionaire oligarch, serving eight years in a labour camp after being convicted of fraud, said in a statement released through his lawyers that Mr Magnitsky had become a pawn in a dangerous game.

"A situation where a person's freedom, health and life is exploited by an investigator, a prosecutor and a judge is unacceptable," he said.

Mr Magnitsky was arrested after he helped Hermitage - once Russia's largest foreign portfolio investor - uncover the biggest alleged tax fraud in the country's history. The $230m crime allegedly involved senior police officers, judges, tax officials, bankers and the mafia. Hermitage is run by Bill Browder, an American financier who took British citizenship and is ironically the grandson of the former leader of the American Communist party.

Mr Browder used to be a vocal supporter of Russia's most powerful politician, president-turned prime minister Vladimir Putin, but was blacklisted by the authorities after waging a corporate anti-corruption campaign that upset powerful people close to the Kremlin. He urged all his lawyers to leave Russia for their safety but Mr Magntisky stayed.

"He said: 'I have nothing to fear. I have done nothing wrong. I haven't even signed any documents. What have I got to be scared of?'" said Mr Browder. "He was the hero who uncovered the fraud."

Mr Magnitsky, who was not a household name in Russia, paid a high price for his refusal to be cowed. A senior policeman whom he accused of involvement in the $230 million fraud arrested him and charged him with conspiracy in an alleged $10m tax evasion scam.

But it was the subsequent failure of the Russian legal system to uphold even the most basic legal tenets that eventually broke him, friends told The Sunday Telegraph.

In an emotional outpouring at his final public appearance before his death, Mr Magnitsky accused the authorities of turning his trial into a sham, complaining he was denied his most basic human rights.

He died four days later after his heart allegedly stopped due to complications of pancreatitis, a condition he had developed during his incarceration for which he was allegedly refused treatment.

"He was in a very agitated state after the hearing," said Jamison Firestone, managing director at Firestone Duncan, the Moscow law firm where Mr Magnitsky worked, holds the Russian authorities responsible for his late employee's untimely death.

"Magnitsky did not die by chance. He died because corrupt Interior Ministry officers killed him. They knowingly imprisoned an innocent man, destroyed his health and denied him access to medical treatment."

In court, after being held for much of the day in what Mr Magnitsky described as "a cage similar to the cages used to keep wild animals", the prosecution served late new evidence to the judge as it sought again to extend his detention.

The judge accepted it, refusing to give Mr Magnitsky's legal team time to study the material. It was the final straw for someone who had believed that lawyers would help reshape the new Russia.

Despairing but still defiant, he rose to address the court and drew on his legal expertise for what proved to be his final plea. "My right... for adequate time and facilities to prepare my defence has been brazenly violated and all petitions that I submitted to the court requesting that this right be ensured have been simply ignored," he said.

For that reason, he said, he would take no further part in the hearing. "This proceeding violates the principle of equality between the prosecution and defence."

A few days later, his mother Natalya arrived at Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina prison to hand over a food parcel for the son she had not seen for an unbearably long year. She had been told he had been transferred there from the squalid Butyrskaya prison earlier that day. But at the gates she was told her son had died.

Mr Magnitsky's 11 months in custody had taken an increasingly debilitating toll on his health. In his own diary, he had detailed the sordid prison conditions and the denial of medical care that cost his life.

His cell floor was sometimes flooded with sewage, the toilet was simply an open hole in the corner of the room, the squeak of rats kept him awake at night, he was rarely allowed to shower and was for a long time denied any visits by his wife, sons aged 17 and eight, or mother.

"Isolation from the outside world exceeds all reasonable limits," he wrote.

The impact was not just mental and in July he was diagnosed with gall bladder stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis. Although prison authorities allowed his relatives to post him various medicine and pills, they did not allow him any more substantial treatment even though doctors said he needed an operation. The pain became so crippling that towards the end of his life he could not even lie down.

Russian authorities have refused to allow a second, independent autopsy, say family and friends. His lawyers said that the authorities originally claimed he died from a rupture to the abdominal membrane, before changing the cause of death to a heart attack.

Shockingly, when his body was released for burial – just before the funeral - his hands and fingers appeared "all smashed up", The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

Either they had been beaten - or he had injured them himself, perhaps by knocking on his cell door in desperate final pleas for help.

But Irina Dudukina, spokesman for the prosecutors' investigative committee, claimed: "He was a key witness and his evidence was very important. The tragic news about his death came as a complete surprise. He had complained about the conditions of his detention but never his health."

As his death raised fresh questions about the perils of doing business in Russia, two new independent reports last week exposed the scale of the problem.

The country was named the world's most fraudulent economy in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm. And Transparency International ranked Russia a lowly 146 out of 180 on its corruption index, level with Zimbabwe.

"This tragedy is again evidence of the reality of the Russian judicial system," said Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association. "If you find yourself being highly critical of the government, the government turns against you."

Mr Magnitsky's own Moscow lawyer, Dmitry Kharitonov, said that while he did not believe the Russian authorities wanted his client to die, he had no doubt where responsibility lay.

"Sergei died only because they held him in inhuman conditions, especially for the last four months, [when] all his requests for medical attention were ignored," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

"This case is unfortunately very revealing because this is how the authorities deal with all inmates, at least in Butyrskaya prison.

"The doctors in that prison said they simply didn't have the equipment to examine him or the medicine to treat him. He wrote in his diaries that the doctors told him 'You'll be treated when you get out.' It was absolute indifference to someone who was suspected of a crime but had not been found guilty."

"His death must be investigated in the most painstaking way and anyone who was involved must be questioned. The conclusions from this are discomforting in the extreme in so far as someone who was accused of tax evasion and who hadn't been found guilty was held in prison for more than a year and died there. All the judicial decisions... were absolutely illegal and unfounded. There were no grounds to throw him in jail or hold him for so long."

Mr Kharitonov also highlighted the stress on Mr Magnitsky after he had arrived at the latest hearing, hopeful he could finally secure his release - only to have new evidence thrown at him at the last minute.

"He had a massive nervous shock because of the trial and was once again framed," his lawyer said.

Mr Kharitonov did not see his client again. And on Friday, a legal expert killed by a rotten legal system was buried.

Mourners lined up to kiss the forehead of Mr Magnitsky's besuited body as he lay in the open polished wooden casket. Then sand was thrown onto the coffin as it was lowered into the ground.

His mother Natalya and wife Natasha clutched flowers as relatives supported them. His older son clenched his fist with anguish and at times, Natasha, his mother, dressed in a brown coat and hat, broke down in tears and closed her eyes to blot out the scene before her.

"When he complained that he was having problems with his health they simply did nothing," said Andrei Jarikov, his brother-in-law, as the distraught family left the graveyard. "They had a duty."